When Harry met... Jarvis Cocker
Harry Borden looks back on two portrait shoots with the charismatic former frontman of Britpop-era band Pulp
Harry Borden looks back on two shoots with the former Pulp frontman
I’ve recently started rediscovering negatives from shoots I did in the 1990s. It’s great fun, particularly finding pictures I’d completely forgotten about – which is not surprising as I was shooting around 200 jobs a year at that time. I’ve found some pictures I really like, and put some of them on my Instagram page; they’ve had a very positive response.
One example is a black & white portrait of Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, taken in 1993. I was commissioned to do the shoot by Select, a music magazine which focused on Britpop bands. At the time, Pulp had been going for a number of years but hadn’t achieved major chart success. However, they had a cult following and would have been well-known to Select’s readers.
Aladdin’s cave of kitsch
I remember going to Jarvis Cocker’s flat, which was in Sceaux Gardens, a 1950’s council estate in Camberwell, south east London. It looked like a rundown area, and I felt a little nervous when unloading my camera equipment. It wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect a potential pop star to live. However, when Jarvis opened the door I found myself in an Aladdin’s cave of kitsch: there was a brightly coloured 1970’s modernist sofa, Guzzini plastic lights and various other brightly coloured retro items. It was a complete contrast to the flat’s grey and mundane concrete exterior. Jarvis himself was thoughtful and quite restrained – very different from his extrovert stage persona. However, he was perfectly happy to do whatever I wanted. I think he’s the type of person who’s very creative, recognises other creative people and lets you get on with doing your thing.
It would have been difficult to use the flat’s interior as a backdrop because it was so cluttered, so I decided to do the shoot out on the stairwell. The main picture shown here is my favourite. The hands are very prominent; idiosyncratic hand movements are part of his stage performance and I probably noticed the position of his hands and asked him to push it a bit further. In Jarvis’s angular appearance and tense hands I was subconsciously referencing Diane Arbus’s 1962 picture ‘Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C’. A number of her pictures are etched in my memory, and occasionally I subconsciously find myself trying to recreate something with that kind of power.
The blurred figure in the background was either one of his friends or a press officer. I got them to walk up and down, then shot at 1/15sec, so Jarvis was still and there was movement in the figure. I felt it gave something extra to the picture. The shot was taken on a Fujifilm GW 670, with fixed 90mm lens, on Kodak Tri-X film, rated at ISO 400.
With fame comes a Porsche
By the time I photographed Jarvis next it was March 1998 and Pulp had recorded two major hit albums: His ‘ n’ Hers (1994) and Different Class (1995), which featured several iconic singles including Common People.
By this stage Jarvis was a superstar, established as part of the cultural landscape and featured frequently in the newspapers. This time, he turned up for the shoot with his publicist in a Porsche.
I was doing the shoot for the Observer and he was being interviewed by journalist Lynn Barber at her house in Highgate, London. Using my Hasselblad, I took some pictures around the house, including in her daughter’s bedroom. The original idea was to move on and shoot some pictures in Highgate Cemetery, but I felt it wasn’t really appropriate for him as he wouldn’t have fitted into that Gothic environment.
‘When Jarvis opened the door I found myself in an Aladdin’s cave of kitsch’
Instead we went to nearby Waterlow Park and shot more images there. Towards the end of the shoot I asked him to zip up the hood of his snorkel parka coat, so only his big, reflective glasses were visible. I liked the idea of being confronted with someone famous and playing with the fact that it’s really them. I was concerned his face would be too dark, so I used a handheld exposure meter to take a reading of the light going into the hood. By exposing only for his face, the line of trees in the background was blown out because it was overexposed. The result was a graphic and intriguing picture, one that ended up in the exhibition for the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award.
In the same way that the first portrait I took of Cocker was subconsciously influenced by the Arbus picture, it’s possible that I had David Bailey’s portrait of Mick Jagger in a fur hood in mind when taking this second picture.
Rather than just copy a famous image, I try to take an idea and use it as a basis to create something that is different and original. This way, rather than getting a pastiche, you get a genuine moment. The line of trees in my picture gives it a kind of municipal ordinariness that suits Jarvis’s style and takes it on to another level. As told to David Clark